Bambi Meets Godzilla In The Middle East

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD, AMERICAN INTEREST

President Obama has had a rude awakening in the Middle East. The region he thought existed was an illusion built on American progressive assumptions about the way the world works. In the dream Middle East, democracy at least of a sort was just around the corner. Moderate Islamists would engage with the democratic process, and the experience would lead them to ever more moderate behavior. If America got itself on the “right side of history,” and supported this hopeful development, both America’s values and its interests would be served. Our relationships with the peoples of the Middle East would improve as they saw Washington supporting the emergence of democracy in the region, and Al Qaeda and the other violent groups would lose influence as moderate Islamist parties guided their countries to prosperity and democracy.

This vision, sadly, has turned out to be a mirage, and Washington is discovering that fact only after the administration followed the deceptive illusion out into the deep desert. The vultures are circling now as American policy crawls forlornly over the dunes; with both the New York Times and the Washington Post running “what went wrong” obituaries for the President’s efforts in Egypt, not even the MSM can avoid the harsh truth that President Obama’s Middle East policies have collapsed into an ugly and incoherent mess.

The President and his team have been taken in by two very old American mistakes about the rest of the world. One is to confuse the end of history with the morning news. The other is to exaggerate America’s importance to the rest of the world. The President is in good company here; most of our political and policy class is deeply steeped in these beguiling fantasies about how the world works, and most of his critics on both the left and the right are as deeply and fatally confused about the region as he and his advisors have been. I’ll get to the inveterate tendency of narcissistic American policy makers and commenters to exaggerate America’s influence in another essay; for now, it’s enough to look at how the deep set American tendency to think that democracy is sweeping the world, right now, has helped wreck the Obama administration’s Middle East policy.

The end of history, which AI founder Francis Fukuyama used to describe the historical implications of the Cold War, is to American political philosophy what the Second Coming is to Christians. In the end, almost all Americans devoutly believe, the liberal, market principles on which our country is built will triumph around the world. Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East and even Russia will some day become democratic societies with market economies softened by welfare states and social safety nets. As a nation, we believe that democracy is both morally better and more practical than other forms of government, and that a regulated market economy offers the only long term path to national prosperity. As democracy and capitalism spread their wonder-working wings across the world, peace will descend on suffering humanity and history as we’ve known it will be at an end.

If these ideas are correct, and you can’t have a career in American public life unless you are willing at least to pretend that you believe them, then over time it is inevitable that these ideas will triumph worldwide. After all, if democratic capitalist countries grow faster and enjoy greater political stability and effectiveness than their opponents, sooner or later the opponents will fail to keep pace with the power of the democratic world and will either be crushed in war (as happened to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan) or will drop, exhausted, out of the competition for power like the Soviet Union.

I actually subscribe to this article of our civic faith; I believe that democratic capitalism works better than the alternatives (though it does not work perfectly) and that other things being equal over time the societies who embrace these ideas will outperform those who do not.

But this does not mean that I believe that the world will become liberal and democratic tomorrow or that the path to this future will be a smooth and steady ascent. As a Christian, I believe in the Second Coming and the Last Judgment; that does not mean I have maxed out my credit cards in the belief that Jesus is returning tomorrow.

Unfortunately, much of our political and policy class, both on the left and the right, shares an unfounded confidence that liberal capitalism is going to triumph tomorrow. They are the secular, liberal counterparts of Christian fundamentalists waiting for the Rapture, a near-magical translation to a better world. This is what most American policy makers believed about Russia in the heady years after the Soviet collapse. President George W. Bush bet the ranch on the imminent democratization of the Middle East. So did President Obama.

This is not a new mistake. Thomas Jefferson was sure that the French Revolution heralded the dawn of democracy in 18th century Europe. Henry Clay thought the Latin American revolutions against Spain would create stable democracies across South America. Many Americans thought the 1848 revolutions in Europe would establish true freedom in the Old World. Many Americans thought that Sun Yat Sen’s revolution in China would establish democracy there back in 1911. Alexander Kerensky’s Russia was hailed as an ‘emerging democracy’ in 1917. Woodrow Wilson thought he could kill history with Fourteen Points and a League. It was a thought crime among liberal and progressive people to doubt that Africa would race ahead to democratic capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s as colonialism ended.

We are not always wrong. Germany, Japan and, in its own eccentric way, Italy all became liberal capitalist states after World War Two. Most of the Warsaw Pact countries signed up to the program in the 1990s. Much of East Asia has been moving in a liberal direction as its prosperity has grown. Mexico, Chile and Brazil, among other Latin states, are looking more like Henry Clay once hoped they would.

As a nation, we are not very good at figuring out when the end of history is going to dawn in particular countries, and because we are looking so hard for the triumph of democratic capitalism, we tend to assume that any sound we hear in the night must be its footsteps drawing nigh. Moreover, because we identify belief in our national principles as a moral quality, we are angry with those who seem to display an insufficient faith. When doubters questioned the Bush administration’s claims that the war in Iraq would begin a democratic transformation of the Middle East, they were called anti-Arab racists. When doubters questioned the Obama administration’s claims that moderate Islamists held the key to a democratic future for the region, they were called racists and Islamophobes. People who question whether Africa is on the brink of a mass breakout to democratic growth must also be expect to be called ugly names.

It seems misanthropic to doubt that a particular country isn’t on the road to freedom and prosperity, and it also seems like heresy against our national creed. That tendency is reinforced among our policy elite and chattering classes. The “experts” ought to know better and be more skeptical, but they are often more naive and more dogmatic than the American people at large. It is often the best educated and connected who are most confident, for example, that political science maxims work better than historical knowledge and reflection when it comes to analyzing events and predicting developments.

When democratic peace theory or some other beautiful intellectual system (backed with regressions and statistically significant correlations in all their austere beauty) adds its weight to the national political religion, a reasonable faith can morph into blind zeal. Bad things often follow.

What Americans often miss is that while democratic liberal capitalism may be where humanity is heading, not everybody is going to get there tomorrow. This is not simply because some leaders selfishly seek their own power or because evil ideologies take root in unhappy lands. It is also because while liberal capitalist democracy may well be the best way to order human societies from an abstract point of view, not every human society is ready and able to walk that road now. Some aren’t ready because like Haiti they face such crippling problems that having a government, any government, that effectively enforces the law and provides basic services across the country is beyond their grasp.

Some aren’t ready because religious or ethnic tensions would rip a particular country apart and cause civil war. Some aren’t ready because the gap between the values, social structures and culture of a particular society make various aspects of liberal capitalism either distasteful or impractical. In many places, the fact that liberal democratic capitalism is historically associated with western imperialism and arrogance has poisoned the well. People simply do not believe that this foreign system will work for them, and they blame many of the problems they face on the countries in Europe and North America who so loudly proclaim the superiority of a system that many people in the global South feel has victimized them.

As a result, there are many countries in the world where the dish Americans most want to eat just isn’t on the menu. This has certainly been true in Egypt, where a pluralistic, liberal society looks pretty effectively out of reach. Egypt’s liberals are too weak and too disconnected from the main currents of their society to govern, and neither the Islamists nor the army is particularly interested in building a liberal society. It was true in Yeltsin’s Russia, where liberal measures (carried out, as was inevitable under the circumstances, by people who were either incompetent or corrupt or both) led to national disintegration and ruin.

In such situations, American diplomacy is generally ineffective and often unites a whole country against us, frustrated by the mix of arrogance and cluelessness that we generally bring to such situations. We issue orders that cannot be fulfilled, judge people and movements by unrealistic standards, form strategic partnerships with individuals and groups who don’t understand their own country very well, set unobtainable goals and fail to grasp the most basic facts of political and social life. We do this over and over again; President Obama has followed a well worn trail into his current predicament.

Meanwhile the President’s most ardent critics, both on the right and the left, believe that his biggest problem is that he isn’t exhibiting sufficient faith in the national credo. Since we know that liberal democracy is triumphing everywhere, if it isn’t working in Egypt it must be the President’s fault. There must have been some policy path, there must still be some policy path, by which the President can bring Egypt into the Promised Land.

Americans need to face an unpleasant fact: while American values may be the answer long term to the Middle East’s problems, they are largely irrelevant to much that is happening there now. We are not going to stop terrorism, at least not in the short or middle term, by building prosperous democratic societies in the Middle East. We can’t fix Pakistan, we can’t fix Egypt, we can’t fix Iraq, we can’t fix Saudi Arabia and we can’t fix Syria. Not even the people who live in those countries can fix them at this point; what has gone wrong is so deeply rooted and so multifaceted that nothing anybody can do will turn them into good candidates for membership in the European Union anytime soon. If we could turn Pakistan into Denmark, the terrorists there would probably settle down—but that isn’t going to happen on any policy-relevant timetable. We must deal with terrorism (and our other interests in the region) in a world in which the basic conditions that breed terrorists aren’t going away.

This isn’t true of all Islamic countries, by the way. Turkey, Malaysia, Iran and Indonesia have their problems, but all of them have more and better choices than the countries going through such convulsions today. Poland and Yugoslavia went in different directions when communism fell; the Islamic world is no more monolithic than the old communist world.

There are, unfortunately, two things we can’t do in the Middle East. We can’t solve our problems and win the love and esteem of the folks who live there by promoting a transition to democracy that isn’t going to happen, and we can’t insulate ourselves from the region’s problems by walking away. Since those are the two alternatives most Americans instinctually prefer, our political and policy systems are going to be stressed. Moralists are going to hector presidents of both parties non-stop for their failures to impose Marquess of Queensbury rules on the various regimes and movements with which we will work, and isolationists are going to resist the commitments that a policy of messy engagement requires.

Winston Churchill famously said that Americans will do the right thing in the end—after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives. I doubt we’ve exhausted all the alternatives yet, and we will likely make more costly and ugly mistakes before we finally find our feet in the new world of the 21st century Middle East. We do, however, seem to be coming to the end of the first phase of failure: the blind belief that the rapid diffusion of democracy and capitalism will make all those nasty, dreary problems melt away.

Meanwhile, at least somebody is getting some benefit out of America’s miserable crawl through the desert. For Egypt’s generals, hungry to use every scrap of material to whomp up patriotic fervor for their cause, every sign of American displeasure, every jet not delivered and every lecture sternly read, is pure gold. The one thing everybody in Egypt agrees on now is that the Americans are about the most horrible people around—arrogant, stupid, judgmental, impractical, and not to be trusted when the going gets tough. The liberals, the generals, the Mubarak family, the Christians, the Islamists: on this one point they can all agree.

Making the coup look anti-American helps the generals make it look patriotic. They benefit from our critiques and our outrage: standing accused of having soldiers and agents whipping up crowds to attack American reporters, issuing sharp rebukes to mealy-mouthed American protests, ostentatiously leaving the clueless American diplomats twisting in the wind: this is balm to the Egyptian soul right now, and money in the bank for the new regime.

[People carry anti-Obama posters as thousands of Egyptian protesters celebrate in Tahrir Square as the deadline given by the military to Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi passes on July 3, 2013 in Cairo, Egypt. Photo courtesy of Getty Images.]

August 20, 2013 | 34 Comments »

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34 Comments / 34 Comments

  1. ArnoldHarris Said:

    Come up with something solid, and maybe they will publish you in American Interest; which probably beats seeing your comments repeatedly blocked on Israpundit

    How do you know I am not published? My screen name on this blog is only used here.

    Never make assumptions you can’t confirm or back up.

  2. @ JSBMahwah:
    @ ArnoldHarris:

    President Obama has had a rude awakening in the Middle East. The region he thought existed was an illusion built on American progressive assumptions about the way the world works. In the dream Middle East, democracy at least of a sort was just around the corner. Moderate Islamists would engage with the democratic process, and the experience would lead them to ever more moderate behavior. If America got itself on the “right side of history,” and supported this hopeful development, both America’s values and its interests would be served. Our relationships with the peoples of the Middle East would improve as they saw Washington supporting the emergence of democracy in the region, and Al Qaeda and the other violent groups would lose influence as moderate Islamist parties guided their countries to prosperity and democracy.

    The end of history, which AI founder Francis Fukuyama used to describe the historical implications of the Cold War, is to American political philosophy what the Second Coming is to Christians.

    Nobody quotes Fukuyama anymore his postulates have been debunked.

    Meanwhile, at least somebody is getting some benefit out of America’s miserable crawl through the desert. For Egypt’s generals, hungry to use every scrap of material to whomp up patriotic fervor for their cause, every sign of American displeasure, every jet not delivered and every lecture sternly read, is pure gold. The one thing everybody in Egypt agrees on now is that the Americans are about the most horrible people around—arrogant, stupid, judgmental, impractical, and not to be trusted when the going gets tough. The liberals, the generals, the Mubarak family, the Christians, the Islamists: on this one point they can all agree.
    Meade is working under the false assumption that Obama is not an intentional player but whose motives are pure but mistaken.

    Meade seems to not agree that the only thing standing between a MB dictatorship over Egypt and the prospect for their desired caliphate is now the Egyptian Army. They are the ones fighting terrorism and not America who are using terrorists as proxy militias first in Libya and Now in Syria and probably down the road in Jordan Lebanon and the Sinai.

    Benghazi is part of this. Adopting and including the MB even into the White House. The behind the scenes deals with the Russian and Chinese.

    The unrestrained 17 trillion dollar debt which is really including off the books obligations are over a hundred trillion dollars. Nobody expects the government to ever meet her obligations. Obama is not the original architect of Americas failures and demise but he has gone the extra mile with an ideological zeal and commitment his predecessors never showed.

    Obama is not a befuddled bystander but the ideological proponent that has from the day he entered office not strayed from the master plan of a diminished America economically and militarily. https://www.israpundit.org/archives/57083/comment-page-1#comment-286599
    Turkey’s Erdogan is Obama’s favorite and closet Ally and adviser in the ME!!! Meade ignores all the details and signs that cumulatively paint a different picture than the one Meade is trying to portray.

    I say Nope and that Obama is not surprised or shocked by the results. Based only on cause and effect he has knowingly and intentionally been part of the cause, even the primary cause and only the effect may not be playing out as planned at least his hoped for timetable but the final chapters have yet to be written.

    Today is exactly one year to the day that Obama declared his Syrian ‘Red Line declaration’ re: use of weapons of mass destruction.

  3. ArnoldHarris Said:

    filmmaker Oliver Stone

    That man is a over-rated misoginist!!!!!!!!!! I watched his movie “Savages” on HBO, incoherant wast of time. Tex enjoyed the sex scenes of the movie many consisted.

  4. @ ArnoldHarris:

    I shall ask around and report back. It depends alot on ones ethnic back-ground.
    I don’t believe [besides playing golf] Obama has much to do with the govt. Someone or some group seems to be calling the shots.

  5. @ yamit82:

    This is a surprising and discordant comment, significantly at variance with the remainder of the thread.

    It would be both helpful and informative if the writer could explain why.

  6. @ yamit82:
    Yamit, Walter Russell Mead is well schooled in foreign policy issues, and most of his observations present a worldview that will be to the advantage of Israel, if and when the American establishment thinks about these issues in greater depth.

    Perhaps you know something factual that destroys his arguments. So what exactly do you know, that you think he is clueless about, and specifically how does that apply to the chaos that besets the Middle East?

    Come up with something solid, and maybe they will publish you in American Interest; which probably beats seeing your comments repeatedly blocked on Israpundit.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  7. To add : Israel can postpone its celebrations yet,until egypt is destroyed. On second thoughts,no,Israel can celebrate now at the continuation of egypt’s weakening, as the prospering of Egypt will meet all possible world resistance,may be more than levied against Hitler.

  8. impeccable article,may be with one exception:
    The americans didnt lose much in egypt,they just substituted mubarak with the lame Morsy,didnt do the job of fully destroying egypt as a one intact nation,so they called on the uniforms to do it. True,american delusion of democracy and open markets failed,but what is the big deal.They have failed many times in the middle east,but this didnt take the wind out of their sails. They will keep trying,with some accomodations.I am an egyptian myself,and i cant help chuckle at the dismay of the americans in egypt,quite hilarious.

  9. The deceiver deceived.
    Centuries of brainwashing, hate demonization, conceit, hidden fascism etc.
    Let us face it, even the Chinese (leaders) reject basic human rights. And they do not pretend to create a Chinese caliphate.

  10. WALTER RUSSELL MEAD doesn’t have a clue and it’s apparent he is as ignorant of history as 99.9% of all Americans.

  11. Honeybee,

    This comment probably is far off-topic, but what do you and other folks around TX,OK and NM think of US Senator Ted Cruz for the Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election? By the way, in the news today is that he is abandoning his Canadian dual citizenship, which would have made some Republicans uncomfortable for a US presidential candidate. The legal experts say that his claim of American citizenship at birth will hold up in any US court, because his mom was a US citizen by birth whose husband was on a temporary work assignment in Canada and she was there when she gave birth to Ted.

    I’m hearing a lot of good things about him from people who have attended events in Iowa, where presidential candidates increasingly show one or two cards from their poker hands not long after the previous election has taken place.

    It probably won’t come as a great surprise to you that my wife and I want Obama either controlled or impeached by a Republican US Congress. Just like Andrew Johnson in the 1860s or William Jefferson Clinton in the 1990s. And not just because of his witless policies that stir up trouble in the Middle East. He really is wrecking America with his unconstitutional actions as president.

    We’re both strong on environmental protection, but we note the Democrats no more protect our open spaces and natural resources than the Republicans do, while the Republicans at least are friendly to law-abiding American owners of our 200-225 million firearms. In any case, we both consider Obama as little more than a snake, which was precisely the Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone described him recently.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  12. America is considerate towards its enemies and treacherous towards its friends.

    Israel needs to prepare for tomorrow. Its alliance with the US cannot be guaranteed.

    Once upon a time, Rome and the Jews were allies. Then Roman interests changed.

    This is true of our world as well – and its sound advice to be taken to heart.

  13. Walter Russell Mead is one of the best logically-inclined thinkers concerning the mostly insoluble problems of the American pursuit of international democracy throughout the history of this country. If his assumptions are correct, and I think they are, then American attempts at democratization of Arab and/or Islamic cultures are doomed to collapse whenever and wherever they are attempted. I also think the most outstanding results of acceptance of these truths by the power-holders of the USA will be of great benefit to the Jewish state and the Jewish nation. It may also be of no small benefit to America’s taxpayers and corporate investors, who largely are compelled to cough up the money to pay for the now fully apparent international inanities not only of Obama, but also of both Bush presidents and not a few others.

    The message to Jerusalem about all this was a warning said to have been given long ago by the USSR’s Andrei Gromyko to that equally long-dead Jewish saint of Israeli liberalism, Abba Eban, when describing Israel’s dependence on the USA:

    “You are leaning against a weak reed, my friend.”

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI